Review Summary

If “Undefeated” — a tear-draining documentary about an underdog black football team and the white coach called Big Daddy Snowflake who led them to victory — were fiction it would be easy to sneer. Impossible, you might think, manipulative, grr. Visions of Sandra Bullock marching through “The Blind Side” alongside a gentle African-American giant might invade your head. Yet while “Undefeated” travels well-tilled inspirational ground, it’s also an irresistible story of football, faith and the lust for happily-ever-after black-and-white endings. The documentary began with a February 2009 article in The Commercial Appeal, a Memphis daily, that caught the eye of one of its producers, Rich Middlemas, who brought it to the attention of the directors Dan Lindsay and T. J. Martin. Written by Jason Smith, the article, “Raising O. C.: Three Families Have Arms Around This Top Prospect,” told the tale of O. C. Brown, Memphis high school offensive tackle who at 16, 315 pounds and several inches north of six feet, was a sweet, soft-spoken behemoth with a talent for, as Mr. Smith put it elsewhere, “plowing through defenders like a Mack truck through a flower bed.” It got better, storywise at least. Mr. Brown, whose mother died when he was a child and whose father wasn’t at home, was being raised with several other children by his grandmother and an older sister. When his grades began to falter, his grandmother and sister threatened to take him off the team, a warning that led to an academic intervention by Bill Courtney (Big Daddy Snowflake) and Mike Ray, two white volunteer Manassas High School coaches. They decided that Mr. Brown needed help, but because no tutor would travel to his neighborhood, the coaches hit on an unusual solution. During the week, Mr. Brown would live at Mr. Ray’s McMansion in a white enclave, where the high schooler would study at night, with Mr. Courtney ferrying him to and from Manassas. The filmmakers smartly pounced on the story and soon discovered that it was richer and more richly populated — Mr. Brown was just one of several heartbreak kids on the Manassas team — than it at first seemed. — Manohla Dargis